Why do Ancient Scripts Die Out?

Today is World Endangered Writing Day, a new initiative by the Endangered Alphabets project aimed at highlighting and celebrating minority and Indigenous writing practices in the modern world, and the communities that practise them. Endangered writing is something we’re very interested in here at VIEWS, as you’ll know if you’ve been following our Endangered Writing Network. We want our work on the scripts of the ancient world to have a beneficial effect today, and one of the ways we can do this is by using ancient case studies to improve our understanding of the idea of ‘vitality’ in writing practices, and conversely, what processes lead scripts and related practices to fall out of use.

When we look back at the ancient world from a vantage point thousands of years later, it’s very easy to lose sight of the people and processes behind social changes in the grand sweep of history. Societies rise and fall, cities are founded, flourish and are destroyed or abandoned. Things can take on a certain air of inevitability: of course nothing lasts for ever, however unimaginable that might be to the people living with those things. Scripts fall by the wayside, just like pottery forms, religions or styles of dress: it would be weird if they didn’t.

But why? Because when we look closer, there’s no inevitable life-cycle of writing. Some are brief flashes of activity, like the alphabetic cuneiform used in the Bronze Age Syrian port of Ugarit, which seems to have been invented, been used across a wide range of contexts and then disappeared entirely in the span of perhaps less than a hundred years. Others, like Mesopotamian cuneiform or Egyptian hieroglyphs last for thousands of years. Our own alphabet – all modern alphabets, in fact – can be traced back to the early second millennium BCE at least, although it has developed enormously over that time and splintered into numerous mutually unintelligible varieties. Many scripts fall somewhere in between, flourishing for a few centuries before becoming obsolete or developing into something different enough that we give it a new name.

To get at these questions, it’s helpful to move away from the grand narratives of history and think about things at a smaller, more human scale: to think about the people who write and read in a certain way (and we must remember that these are different skills, and that not everyone who could do one could necessarily do the other, at least not to the same extent). Scripts and writing practices are not things with an existence or life of their own: they are only things people use and participate in. We might ask ‘Why do scripts die out’, but what we really mean is ‘Why do people stop using them?’ There’s a very interesting article by Stephen Houston called ‘The Small Deaths of Maya Writing’, which has shaped a lot of my own thinking on this. In it, Houston points out that script death is not a single event but a piecemeal process, an accumulation of little incidents and decisions by practitioners reacting to the circumstances they find themselves in.

When can we say a script has actually died out? Let’s use that alphabetic cuneiform from Ugarit as an example. On the face of it, this is a very open and shut case. Around 1180 BCE, during the upheavals of the end of the Late Bronze Age, the city of Ugarit was destroyed. Apart from a few nomads, it was never reoccupied and there are no confirmed attestations of its alphabetic cuneiform script after this date. But destroying a city doesn’t automatically put an end to its writing practices. The people of Ugarit didn’t just disappear. They probably didn’t even all die. There were no mass graves or bodies in the streets. For the most part, as far as we can tell, most people seem to have left before the end. We don’t know where they went, but most likely they settled in nearby towns and villages: while many settlements were sacked in the region around this time, especially on the coast, it certainly wasn’t all of them, and many of those that were destroyed were rebuilt in fairly short order. So when did alphabetic cuneiform die out? Should we say it was with the destruction of Ugarit and the palace administration and religious institutions that were the main places it was used? Or when the last document or inscription was made before that – even though we can never know exactly what that was? But presumably there were survivors who still knew how to read and/or write the script. So did the script really ‘die’ when these people gave up on using it? When they decided not to pass it on to anyone else, or couldn’t find anyone interested in learning it? When they finally died themselves, taking their skills with them? Or even when the last people forgot that the script had even existed, when the last tablets fell out of sight and mind?

One of the tablets of the Ugaritic Baal myth. From Wikimedia user Rama.

There are a lot of questions here and precious few answers. It’s probably obvious that answers to many of them are impossible. But I hope they show how complicated and human even the most ostensibly straightforward ‘script death’ can be.

So if these questions are thought experiments and not really answerable, what can studying ancient writing tell us about why scripts and writing practices fall out of use? What contribution can we make to modern efforts to support and preserve minority writing practices? One answer is to explore ideas of ‘vitality’ and the contexts in which writing is used. We can look at what features and usage patterns are shared by writing practices that last a long time and those that fall from use quite quickly. This might mean looking at how restricted writing was: in many ancient societies, reading and writing seem to have been practised by only very small numbers of people, or for very limited purposes. This was the case with Linear B in Mycenaean Greece, for example. As far as we can tell, and unlike many other ancient scripts, this seems only to have been used for administration – tax records, in effect. When socio-political crisis brought an end to these bureaucracies, there was much less reason to keep using it than there would have been if it had been used in other contexts such as religion, literature and so on. In Ugarit, alphabetic cuneiform was used across a wide range of genres, but it was still very restricted in other ways. It seems to have been very closely linked to the palatial elite and their efforts to define a local identity. Given that it apparently came out of nowhere and immediately seems to be widely attested for official use, it’s not unreasonable to link the emergence of the script to some sort of political decision. It was also primarily used for internal functions such as administration, letters between Ugaritians and writing down Ugarit’s mythology in its own language, whereas for ‘externally-orientated’ purposes such as diplomacy, international letters or law, Akkadian cuneiform was used. We have only a handful of alphabetic cuneiform inscriptions from outside Ugarit, which are usually in non-standard varieties of the script. So again, if writing was closely associated with a local political elite’s identity and practices, this likely made the script vulnerable if that elite and the city that was its focus were destroyed or discredited.

By looking at ancient case studies and keeping in mind human decisions to use a script or not, to pass it on or not, we can gain insights into what enables some writing practices to adapt, to change usage patterns or to weather crises, cultural changes or social upheavals. Often scripts that are widely used, both in terms of geographic spread and in terms of different contexts of use, seem to be better placed than those that occupy a very specific cultural niche. But we also need to think about how scripts end up in these positions, and that means thinking about the relationship between script and culture, what writing is seen as for and why it might have been desirable or undesirable. In the past this has sometimes been treated in quite functional ways, in terms of efficiency or ease of learning, but writing is more than that. It’s a cultural statement, a tradition and a means of expression.

The study of endangered scripts, the vitality of writing practices and the processes of how they fall out of use is still in its infancy. It’s something we at VIEWS are going to keep thinking about and developing our ideas on, and we hope others will also take up the topic.

Our PI, Pippa Steele will be talking in conversation about some of these issues online as part of World Endangered Writing Day. Find more details and register here.

You might also be interested in her talk at the launch of the Endangered Writing Network: